My work has been featured in both print and online media, including the Brooklyn Museum online, The New York Times, Art in America, ARTNews, and others. I was also recently featured in an ARTnews cover story on social media art. That was pretty cool.

"Social media art involves 'seamlessly blending the online and offline worlds,' in the words of L.A. artist An Xiao Mina, whose widely read series on the subject appeared last summer on the website Hyperallergic.com. The Internet offers a pair of elements that most other media don't: open-endedness and enormous scale."

"So, what is social media art? An emerging genre that’s experimental in practice and results that makes use of social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, or whatever the social network du jour may be. An Xiao Mina, one of the medium’s most well-known practitioners and advocates, tentatively used 4 rules to broadly define it: 1) the web is used for marketing, sourcing, and expressing the art. 2) The audience is involved, hence the name social, yeah? 3) The art is conceptually wealthy but open to those beyond the confines of the art world. 4) It’s adaptable to other platforms, and so is all about the artist’s intent."

"An Xiao, an early adapter to Web 2.0 and the founder of @Platea, a collective of online art makers, [said,] 'I think social-media art is a new genre of art,' she says. 'It blends many different things. It blends performance art because it is people interacting socially with each other. It blends visual art because Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and the rest all rely on very visual elements. It blends net art, but it is in more of a public space than traditional net art.'"

"Can we talk? That seems to be an urgent art world question, partly because of an economic shakedown that sensible people — i.e., the writers of art fair news releases — keep saying is over, or never happened. But New York artists, in need of jobs or apartments or ways to pay their art school loans, are pretty sure that it did happen, and that it isn't all that over, even if the Armory Show really had an extraspecial year," writes Holland Cotter in this review of #class, organized by Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida and presented at Winkleman Gallery. He goes on to mention a few of the discussions that caught his eye: "And the writer Joanne McNeil and the artist An Xiao led a panel on the notion that the art world isn't as racially integrated as it likes to think."

An Xiao, meanwhile, will be communicating without speaking, and by moving very little. In a piece entitled The Artist Is Kinda Present, Xiao will talk back and forth using a microblog for 15 minutes, despite the fact that she and the participant will be sitting face-to-face, just feet away from each other. "I'm drawn towards the idea of texting – Twitter, douban and microblog. Even if you're in the same room as someone, we use these social media to communicate. I want to take this experience out of context, but facing me and having a blogging conversation."

"In social media, people are primed to create," said Xiao, citing the abundance of user-made videos posted on YouTube and Facebook users' tendency to glamorize their profile photos. "People don't just want to watch or engage, they actually want to create the art. … Social media art turns into crowd-created art," said Xiao. This notion of crowd-created art-that, at some point, you have to give control to the masses-is one of the through-lines connecting the diverse projects discussed at the panel."

"Trained in philosophy, Ms. Xiao, 25, came to art through photography, writing and an interest in communication that goes back to her childhood, when she wrote letters to her grandmother in the Philippines. The letters, she said, related little moments that add up to a portrait of the writer, the way social networking does now with a series of — as she put it — 'totally inane things,'" writes Jan Ellen Spiegel in this Sunday arts review of Status Update at Yale/Haskins Laboratories.

"Out on the town recently, at cocktail parties and gallery openings, artist An Xiao has been hearing her online name, 'thatwaszen,' piercing through the din," writes Gillian Reagan as she discusses Facebook's decision to make vanity URLs available to all users. "So, last week, Ms. Xiao was interested to hear the news (on Twitter, of course) that Facebook would allow users to choose their own username and create a simplified address—also known as a 'vanity URL'—that would incorporate personal brands and common online nicknames."

"This New York conceptual artist uses Twitter as 'a scrapbook, a way to capture thoughts and share them', believing that the 140-character limit enforces 'a discipline of thought and economy of language that encourages sharp ideas". She also creates Twitter-based artworks,' writes Ruth Jamieson, in her list of the "who's who" of the Twitter art world. An Xiao's work on Twitter is mentioned alongside that of Yoko Ono, the Brooklyn Museum, the Tate and others.

"With Morse code, since it was so expensive and it was so new, all you could really send were important messages. But with Twitter, what's really interesting is that you're sending updates about what you're eating for breakfast or how tired you are or that you don't have any coffee. I'm really fascinated at that connection." In this video interview with the Brooklyn Museum, An Xiao discusses the concepts behind her work as a feature artist for the 1stfans Twitter Art Feed.